


Within the Jungle

by Ladybug_21



Category: Okja (2017)
Genre: Attractive Villain, Character Study, Gen, redemption arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24674335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Frank Dawson had always been a survivor.
Kudos: 5





	Within the Jungle

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so I know that the point of _Okja_ really was not to find the suave corporate villains in beautiful suits to be devastatingly attractive—but, I mean, Giancarlo freaking Esposito. 😍
> 
> I own no rights to _Okja_ , they all belong to the brilliant Bong Joon-ho. And the title of this story is a perhaps-too-obvious nod to Upton Sinclair.

Frank Dawson had always been a survivor.

He had to be, see, as the son of a poor pig farmer in a heartless world. Not that the lesson came easy. When he was seven, and one of his father's sows died, Frank decided to raise her piglets on his own, since none of the other sows were willing. He named them after the foods he fed them: Apple, Clover, Slops. And he grinned as he watched them grow large and rambunctious, as they nuzzled their snouts lovingly into the palms of his hands.

Looking back on it, Frank supposed he always knew what would become of his piglets. But it didn't make it any easier when one day, he went to find them in the sty and they were gone.

"Stop crying, Frankie," his father ordered when he found Frank sobbing in a corner of the barn. His father was a tall man with a deep voice and a stern face worn harsh from the overbearing summer sun and the general vicissitudes of life. "They never were your pigs, and you always knew they weren't. If you want to survive in this world, you can't be so sentimental. It's a jungle out there, and there are only two kinds of people who let their guards down: the fools who don't care about being eaten, and the ones powerful enough to alter the landscape. So unless you've already either lost or won, don't even think about crying."

Frank was equal parts awestruck and terrified by his father. So he dried his tears, and he fed the pigs, and he trained himself to put survival above all else.

This maxim served him well as he entered first college—the first in his family to attend—and then business school. Frank heard the snickers behind his back, about how a farm boy like him didn't know how to dress, didn't know the correct etiquette, hadn't grown up in a wealthy family with a name dating back to the Mayflower and a string of sires with degrees from Ivies. He pretended not to hear. He avoided forming attachments. He ignored the jeers and crouched in silent readiness, waiting to take the resentment that simmered in his gut and fling it back in their faces one day, unexpected and scalding hot.

And Frank not only survived, he thrived. Part of it was the lucky break of getting his start in the middle tier of management at the Mirando Corporation, in the heyday of Nancy Mirando. Nancy quickly noticed Frank, and she liked what she saw. It wasn't just his quick, analytical brain, or the fact that he looked "pretty damn fine in a well-cut suit," as she put it with one of those unblinking, shark-like grins.

"We're alike, you and me," she told Frank late one evening, four bourbons in and yet somehow still terrifyingly lucid. "We're both loyal to exactly two things in life: the pursuit of power, and our own fucking hides."

Nancy Mirando had a voracious appetite, to match her selachimorph demeanor. Unlike her anxious sister, who cared so very much about the appearance of things, Nancy would scarf down food with the crudity of a sailor on shore leave, then dare others to critique her performance with one of her unnerving stares. "Let them compare me to Daddy," she'd scoff. "It was a fucking war. Back then, he was a _hero_ for providing the napalm that the Defense Department needed. These shits never appreciate the things that make their cushy lifestyles possible." But it was this sneering attitude that ultimately led to her ouster, of course. Frank, essential and yet unobtrusive, expected to relinquish his place behind the press conference podium to an equally attractive figure in a suit, but Nancy stopped him, her clenched, scarlet-taloned fist pressed to his lapel.

"Oh, you're not going anywhere, Frank," she breathed, her smile more of a snarl. "You're gonna stay put as the power behind the throne. And you're gonna make sure my idiot sister doesn't run my company into the ground. I'll be biding my time, waiting for you to give me the signal that it's time for me to come reclaim what's mine, you hear?"

And Frank simply nodded. It wasn't even purely fear. Nancy Mirando reeked of power and of ruthlessness, and the smell of it wafted onto Frank and clung to his well-tailored suits. Nancy would remain the undetected heart of Mirando Corporation, unsentimentally pulsing blood and oxygen through the company's veins, even as her nervous twin became the company's face. But Frank would now get to be the true brains of the day-to-day operations. He let the scent of power seep into the weave of his suits, and he found he wore it just as well as Nancy did.

Besides, unlike all of the other corporate fuckwads at the newly reformed Mirando Corporation, with their MBAs from Harvard and Stanford, Frank Dawson could walk into a factory that positively stank of pig shit and not so much as flinch.

Nancy Mirando was out to win at any cost and didn't give a fuck what people thought about her. All Lucy Mirando wanted, by contrast, was to be _liked_. It truly was pathetic, Frank felt, watching the new CEO giggle and simper with the press. He stood high above the goings-on, rolling his eyes, mouthing along with the painstakingly rehearsed speech, wishing to god that he didn't have to witness this desperate plea on Lucy's behalf to be adored by the public. Power wasn't about being popular. Power was about accumulating enough wealth to buy your own fucking private security force, so that popularity was always a moot point. A twisted half-smile formed on Frank's usually expressionless poker face when he considered that he, a poor black kid from the sticks who had grown up terrified of the police, suddenly had the power to call them in on anyone who threatened his authority. No wonder those who held power were always so loath to relinquish it.

And so, as the anointed power behind the throne, he put up with Lucy's self-pitying little monologues of insecurity and doubt. He spoon-fed her Nancy's ideas and let Lucy claim them as her own, twitchy with nerves. Frank was finally at the height that his father had challenged him to reach, all those years ago. Even if it meant playing nice with an idiot loser like Lucy Mirando, Frank finally was in a position to alter the landscape. He curried favor with both twins, patiently waiting, knowing that he was secure whichever way the balance of power tipped. Knowing that, no matter what turbulence rocked the company, he would survive.

But then came Okja.

At first, Frank enjoyed playing the level-headed hero of the moment, coolly making Lucy Mirando coffee when the rest of her team had frozen in panic. And, when Nancy's moment finally arrived, Frank was there to facilitate the transition of power seamlessly. But Frank found himself avoiding watching the little girl who had fought her way across the Pacific to retrieve her super pig. There was something simultaneously alien and far too familiar about the stubborn set of her jaw, the desperation in her eyes as she watched the beast thrash about in panic on the stage. Frank had always been determined to survive; he had stuffed any sentimentality into the darkest, most remote recesses of his mind. And it had been so easy to see the super pigs as just unusually tasty monsters, the modern Prometheuses of their age. Now, though, watching Mija put herself between danger and her pig, something long hidden beneath Frank's suave exterior was violently wrenched from where it had been buried for decades. The place where it had been dislodged festered long after Black Chalk had finished clearing every last balaclava-wearing A.L.F. member from the streets of New York.

Nancy Mirando was the consummate businesswoman. Her language was currency; her religion, capitalism. Every moment of her interaction with Mija at the slaughterhouse was perfectly logical, according to her established worldview. And yet, as he tucked his bloodstained kerchief back into his pocket, as he followed Nancy Mirando and her new golden pig trinket out of the slaughterhouse, something felt wrong to Frank. He thought about the two A.L.F. members whom Black Chalk had arrested, the Korean American man with mischief sparkling in his eyes, and the pasty white man with the earnest face and sanctimonious air of a clergyman. "You already have shitloads of money," the latter had pointed out.

Nancy Mirando was at the top of the food chain in this jungle. She had the power to alter the landscape. She could _afford_ to be merciful. There would be no cost to her. But, Frank realized, she was a captive to the very systems that positioned her above everyone else. Nancy wielded capitalism as a weapon, and yet she was so tightly gripped in its unrelenting fist that she could no longer imagine the world beyond its dictates. The CEO viewed life purely in terms of exchange, a pig for a pig. She had lost sight of the fact that true power meant the ability and the gall to break the rules with no consequence. And that made her weaker than Frank had ever recognized.

Besides, it did not bode well that Nancy viewed literally everything as an instrumentality, as a potential object of barter. Frank knew what it meant to play the system as ruthlessly as she did, but he also knew that he needed Nancy far more than she needed him, now that she was back at the helm of a multibillion-dollar enterprise. He was expendable. He was useful, perhaps, but extraordinarily exchangeable. He had always known this, he supposed. But, watching Black Chalk lead Mija and Okja away as bodyguards, even as they dragged the two A.L.F. members off as prisoners, Frank took very careful stock of his position. And all the while, as they marched from the slaughterhouse and drove off in armored vans, he could hear the mournful bellows of the condemned super pigs. From a distance, he could have sworn that he heard names on the blood-drenched air: _Apple, Clover, Slops_...

Frank Dawson had always been a survivor, and an adept survivor knows how to adapt. The toughest rats are the ones who have enough sense to abandon ship when they sense that the hull is rotting through at its core and doomed to sink. He kept his shirts crisply pressed, his shoes impeccably shined. He ensured that the upcoming Mirando Corporation exposition was planned to perfection. And when he noticed a bus pull up in the parking lot of the exposition grounds, he simply ignored the crew of balaclava-wearing figures slinking off of it, until he nearly walked straight into two of them rounding a corner.

"Shit," one of them swore, and his friend put a steadying hand on his shoulder. Frank somehow recognized their eyes from that night in the slaughterhouse. He glanced upwards to check for security cameras and saw none. Then he pulled his phone from the pocket of his suit jacket and held it up.

"Of all of the employees at Mirando Corporation, exactly one person is authorized to call in Black Chalk," he explained in a quiet voice. "This means that exactly one person has Black Chalk's number programmed into his phone. And wouldn't it be a shame, if his phone's screen inopportunely shattered just moments before a _disruption_ broke out at this exposition—shattered so completely that the address book couldn't be accessed or viewed at all?"

Frank removed his phone from its cover and carefully placed it facedown in front of the two men. They watched him warily as he stepped away, clearly unsure if this was a trap. But suddenly the Korean American man sprang forward and ground his heel into the phone, and his pasty friend wasted no time following suit. The phone's screen was disfigured in mere seconds.

Frank watched them calmly, then stepped forward, picked his phone back up, and slid it into its cover again.

"Be careful," blurted the Korean American man. "We can't tell the others not to hurt you, if things get violent."

"Oh, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to step away from the exposition for a few minutes," Frank explained. "My phone screen just shattered completely, and I can't effectively communicate with anyone else here until I go and get it replaced, can I?"

Frank made sure to run into Jennifer and explain the situation before he headed to the parking lot, where he could order someone to drive him to the nearest phone repair. And as he was driven away from the exposition in the air-conditioned interior of the company car, Frank smiled slightly. With any luck, his inactions were about to alter the landscape just a little bit more for the Mirando Corporation, and he and his exquisite suits would be well out of the way of harm and blame. Not that it mattered much to Frank, if Nancy decided to fire him in the most humiliating fashion possible, or even sue him for any number of reasons. Frank had enough capital stored to afford the consequences of his sentimentality. And besides, he had had more than enough of life in this particular jungle.


End file.
